Isamu Noguchi’s Woman with Holes II, hewn from Portuguese marble, is a sensuous and elegant example of the artist’s career-long interrogation of material, space, and form. One of a series of works from the late 1950s and 60s that reference the female form, including Woman with Holes I from 1958, the present interpretation offers a profound insight into Noguchi’s theoretical and aesthetic creeds. His unique abstract visual language draws upon the iconography of Surrealist biomorphism, European modernism, and Japanese minimalism, hinting in many places at feminine curvature while ultimately resisting complete figuration. Bespeaking its importance, the present work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual exhibition of contemporary sculpture in 1970, alongside works by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, and Donald Judd. Nebulous and voluptuous, the rounded form of the present work is visually divided into three segments by the varying hues of its surface, its alternating tones drawing our focus to its materiality. At its core, Woman with Holes II represents the very essence of Noguchi’s artistic practice; seeking the inherent spirit and dynamism of each material, the artist strove to reveal his chosen stone’s identity, or the intent of its being. The resulting sculpture, with its effortlessly finished surface, graceful formulation of line, and serene presence in space, exudes a remarkable sense of balance and t.mes lessness.

Noguchi was a Modernist of the New York School who synthesized fusions between dichotomies such as Asian and Western cultures, ancient and modern art, and the practical and the utopian. Works such as Woman with Holes II reveal the abiding influence of the artistic milieu that surrounded the young artist at the nascence of his career, from Surrealist organic forms to the elegant reductionism of Modern sculptors such as Jean Arp, Henry Moore, and Constantin Brancusi. Unlike the notions of heroic self-expression that characterized the Action Painters at mid-century, Noguchi’s creative spirit was more akin to philosophical artists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman. By 1969, the year in which the present work was created, Noguchi had distilled these myriad influences into the concentrated substance of his own artistic purpose. As he explained, “The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence. All dimensions are but.mes asures of it, as in the relative perspective of our vision lie volume, line, point, giving shape, distance, proportion. Movement, light, and t.mes itself are also qualities of space. Space is otherwise inconceivable. These are the essences of sculpture and as our concepts of them change so must our sculpture change. I say it is the sculptor who orders and animates space, gives it.mes aning.” (The artist quoted in: Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, New York 1978, p. 85)

Of particular importance to Noguchi’s artistic development – and especially palpable in the present work – was the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. A Guggenheim fellowship in 1927 afforded Noguchi the opportunity to travel to Paris, where he spent six months as an assistant in the Romanian modernist’s studio; it was here that Noguchi first approached stone and marble as a medium. Noguchi’s admiration of the organic composition and lyrical refinement that defined Brancusi’s sculptural genius is a clear inspiration for Noguchi’s movement away from realist figuration and towards an abstraction that blended the most natural materials with a primal sensibility. Indeed, the sublime grace and quiet power of Woman with Holes II bears a strong resemblance in its elemental, simplified character to some of Brancusi’s greatest works, including The Kiss from 1907 and Sleeping Muse from 1910. Here, Noguchi appropriates those qualities that he admired in Brancusi’s work and assimilates them into his own organic visual language, offering a playful amalgamation of figuration and abstraction while simultaneously accentuating the marble’s natural properties. The alluring surface of the present work reveals every vein and variation in hue, from blush and rose to silver and cream, its smooth texture and supple curves belying the cold, hard rock from which it was made. The artist often chose his stones based on the unique spiritual energies he felt within them and aimed to reveal that lively essence to the world. In his own words, “To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of t.mes , I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity—not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.” (The artist quoted in: Hayden Herrera, Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, New York 2015, p. 4).